My mom told me a while back that she’d been considering buying me the King Kong DVD for Christmas. I thanked her for not encouraging filmmakers to keep remaking that movie by spending her hard-earned retirement dollars on it. She seemed surprised.
Once my mother called me at work to ask me a technical question about an old word processor called WordStar; when I told her that I didn’t know anything about WordStar, she got very upset with me and said, “But you have a degree in computer science!” For some reason, she thinks that because the University of Alabama considered me educated enough in computers to deem me worthy enough to have a degree in computer science, I automatically know everything there is to know about computers — she also thinks I can work miracles that the Vendors say can’t be done, which is sometimes the case, but not part of this story. 
Anyway, by the same logic, she also seems to think that since I like science fiction and fantasy movies, I must like all science fiction and fantasy movies.
Clearly she doesn’t understand that some science fiction and fantasy are just beyond my suspension of disbelief or even my ability to appreciate the filmmakers’ art, which is also a different story — The Hulk is a horrible movie, for example, but extremely well put together except for the CGI for the superhero genre; it’s exactly like a filmed comic book.
Anyway, so I love watching the remake of Godzilla though admittedly the baby Godzillas really pull my disbelief suspenders close to the snapping point. If it’s on t.v. on a weekend afternoon like today, I’ll probably watch it. To me, it’s kind of believable because Godzilla is the product of mankind’s misdeeds — nuclear testing. I can buy into the whole mutation of nature thing and mankind suffering for having pissed off Mother Nature.
So, I haven’t watched King Kong and I’m not likely to. It’s the concept I can’t get past. It’s the idea that there’s an island out there that we haven’t discovered yet where there are giant apes and other such things. I can’t get my head around that. I can buy into the idea that there’s creatures we haven’t identified yet in the sea and I can buy that there’s small animals and birds we may not have uncovered deep in the jungles of South America, but giant apes on islands…no.
I get it that both stories have the same moral that ultimately mankind callously destroys nature and that we have to live with the consequences. Still, one is on the edge of snapping my disbelief suspenders and I can’t even pull my disbelief suspenders up at all for the others. It’s proof that not all science fiction and fantasy is created equal.
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